Bloodfever (3 page)

I blinked, fumbling for an answer. I could hardly say I stabbed a vampire and he tried to kill me. “I fell. On the stairs.”

“Got to be careful there. Stairs can be tricky.” He looked around the room. “Which stairs?”

“They're in the back.”

“How did you bang up your face? Hit the banister?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Who's Barrons?”

“What?”

“This store is called Barrons Books and Baubles. I wasn't able to find anything in public records about an owner, dates of sale for the building, or even a business license. In fact, although this address shows on my maps, to all intents and purposes, the building doesn't exist. So, who's Barrons?”

“I'm the owner of this bookstore. Why?”

I jerked, stifling a gasp. Sneaky man. He was standing right behind us, the epitome of stillness, one hand on the back of the sofa, dark hair slicked back from his face, his expression arrogant and cold. No surprise there. Barrons
is
arrogant and cold. He's also wealthy, strong, brilliant, and a walking enigma. Most women seem to find him drop-dead sexy, too. Thankfully I'm not most women. I don't get off on danger. I get off on a man with strong moral fiber. The closest Barrons ever gets to fiber is walking down the cereal aisle at the grocery store.

I wondered how long he'd been there. With him you never know.

The inspector stood, looking mildly rattled. He took in Barron's size, his steel-toed boots, the hardwood floors. Jericho Barrons is a tall, powerfully built man. I knew O'Duffy was wondering how he could have failed to hear him approach. I no longer waste time wondering about that sort of thing. In fact, so long as he keeps watching my back, I'll continue to ignore the fact that Barrons doesn't seem to be governed by the natural laws of physics.

“I'd like to see some identification,” growled the inspector.

I fully expected Barrons to toss O'Duffy from the shop on his ear. He had no legal compulsion to comply and Barrons doesn't suffer fools lightly. In fact, he doesn't suffer them at all, except me, and that's only because he needs me to help him find the
Sinsar Dubh
. Not that I'm a fool. If I've been guilty of anything, it's having the blithely sunny disposition of someone who enjoyed a happy childhood, loving parents, and long summers of lazy-paddling ceiling fans and small-town drama in the Deep South which—while it's great—doesn't do a thing to prepare you for life beyond that.

Barrons gave the inspector a wolfish smile. “Certainly.” He removed a wallet from the inner pocket of his suit. He held it out but didn't let go. “And yours, Inspector.”

O'Duffy's jaw tightened but he complied.

As the men swapped identifications, I sidled closer to O'Duffy so I could peer into Barrons' wallet.

Would wonders never cease? Just like a real person, he had a driver's license. Hair: black. Eyes: brown. Height: 6' 3". Weight: 245. His birthday—was he kidding?—Halloween. He was thirty-one years old and his middle initial was
Z
. I doubted he was an organ donor.

“You've a box in Galway as your address, Mr. Barrons. Is that where you were born?”

I'd once asked Barrons about his lineage, he'd told me Pict and Basque. Galway was in Ireland, a few hours west of Dublin.

“No.”

“Where?”

“Scotland.”

“You don't sound Scottish.”

“You don't sound Irish. Yet here you are, policing Ireland. But then the English have been trying to cram their laws down their neighbors' throats for centuries, haven't they, Inspector?”

O'Duffy had an eye tic. I hadn't noticed it before. “How long have you been in Dublin?”

“A few years. You?”

“I'm the one asking the questions.”

“Only because I'm standing here letting you.”

“I can take you down to the station. Would you prefer that?”

“Try.” The one word dared the Garda to try, by fair means or foul. The accompanying smile guaranteed failure. I wondered what he'd do if the inspector attempted it. My inscrutable host seems to possess a bottomless bag of tricks.

O'Duffy held Barrons' gaze longer than I expected him to. I wanted to tell him there was no shame in looking away. Barrons has something the rest of us don't have. I don't know what it is, but I feel it all the time, especially when we're standing close. Beneath the expensive clothes, unplaceable accent, and cultured veneer, there's something that never crawled all the way out of the swamp. It didn't want to. It likes it there.

The inspector apparently deemed an exchange of information the wisest, or maybe just the easiest course. “I've been in Dublin since I was twelve. When my father died, my mother remarried an Irishman. There's a man over at Chester's says he knows you, Mr. Barrons. Name's Ryodan. Ring a bell?”

“Ms. Lane, go upstairs,” Barrons said, instantly, softly.

“I'm perfectly fine here.” Who was Ryodan and what didn't Barrons want me to know?

“Up. Stairs. Now.”

I scowled. I didn't have to look at O'Duffy to know he was regarding me with acute interest—and pity. He was thinking Barrons was the name of the flight of stairs I'd fallen down. I hate pity. Sympathy isn't quite as bad. Sympathy says, I know how it feels, doesn't it just suck? Pity means they think you're defeated.

“He doesn't beat me,” I said irritably. “I'd kill him if he did.”

“She would. She has a temper. Stubborn, too. But we're working on that, aren't we, Ms. Lane?” Barrons turned his wolf smile on me, and jerked his head up toward the ceiling.

Someday I'm going to push Jericho Barrons as far as I can and see what happens. But I'm going to wait a while, until I'm stronger. Until I'm pretty sure I've got a trump card.

I may have been forced into this war, but I'm learning to choose my battles.

 

I didn't see Barrons for the rest of the day.

A dutiful soldier, I retreated to the ditches as ordered and hunkered down there. In those ditches, I had an epiphany. People treat you as badly as you let them treat you.

Key word there: let.

Some people are exceptions, mostly parents, best friends, and spouses, though in my bartending job at The Brickyard, I've seen married people do worse things to each other in public than I'd do in private to someone I couldn't stand. Bottom line is most of the world will push you as far as you let them. Barrons might have sent me to my room, but
I'm
the idiot that went. What was I afraid of? That he'd hurt me, kill me? Hardly. He'd saved my life last week. He needed me. Why had I let him intimidate me?

I was disgusted with myself. I was still behaving like MacKayla Lane, part-time bartender, part-time sun-worshipper, and full-time glamour girl. My recent brush with death had made it clear that chick wasn't going to survive over here, a statement emphatically punctuated by ten unpolished, broken fingernails. Unfortunately, by the time I had my epiphany and stormed back downstairs, Barrons and the inspector were gone.

Worsening my already foul mood, the woman who runs the bookstore and carries a major torch for Barrons had arrived. Stunning, voluptuous, in her early fifties, Fiona doesn't like me at all. I suspect if she knew Barrons kissed me last week she'd like me even less. I was nearly unconscious when he did it, but I remember. It's been impossible to forget.

When she looked up from the numbers she was punching in on her cell phone, I decided maybe she
did
know. Her eyes were venomous, her mouth a moue fanned by delicate wrinkles. With each quick, shallow inhalation, her lacy blouse trembled over her full bosom, as if she'd just dashed somewhere in a great hurry, or was suffering great distress. “What was Jericho doing here today?” she asked in a pinched tone. “It's Sunday. He's not supposed to be here on Sunday. I can't imagine any reason for him to stop by.” She scanned me from head to toe, looking, I think, for signs of a recent tryst: tousled hair, perhaps a missed button on my blouse, or panties overlooked in the haste of dressing, left bunched in the leg of my jeans. I did that once. Alina saved me before Mom caught me.

I almost laughed. A tryst with Barrons? Get real.

“What are
you
doing here?” I countered. No more good little soldier. The bookstore was closed and neither of them should have been here, raining on my already rainy parade.

“I was on my way to the butcher when I saw Jericho stepping out,” she said tightly. “How long was he here? Where were you just now? What were the two of you doing before I came?” Jealousy so vibrantly colored her words I expected her breath to come out in little green puffs. As if conjured by the unspoken accusation that we'd been doing the dirty, a vision of Jericho Barrons naked—dark, despotic, and probably flat-out ferocious in bed—flashed through my mind.

I found it staggeringly erotic. Disturbed, I performed a hasty mental calendar count. I was ovulating. That explained it. I get indiscriminatingly horny for three days when I am: the day before, the day of, and the day after; Mother Nature's sneaky little way of ensuring survival of the human race, I guess. I check out guys I wouldn't normally look at, especially ones in tight jeans. I catch myself trying to decide if they're lefties or righties. Alina used to laugh and say if you can't tell, Junior, you don't want to know.

Alina. God, I missed her.

“Nothing, Fiona,” I said. “I was upstairs.”

She stabbed a finger at me, her eyes dangerously bright, and I was suddenly afraid she would cry. If she cried I'd lose all backbone. I can't stand older women crying. I see my mom in every one.

I was relieved when she snarled at me instead. “Do you think he healed your wounds because you matter to him? Do you think he cares? You mean nothing to him! You couldn't possibly understand that man and his moods. His needs. His desires. You're a stupid, selfish, naïve child,” she hissed. “Go home!”

“I'd
love
to go home,” I shot back. “Unfortunately, I don't have that choice!”

She opened her mouth but I didn't catch what she was saying because I'd already turned and was banging through the connecting doors to the private residence part of the store, in no mood to get dragged any further into the argument she was spoiling to have. I left her shouting something about how she didn't have choices, either.

I went upstairs. Yesterday Barrons had told me to lose the splints. I'd told him bones didn't heal that fast, but my arm was itching like crazy again, so I went in the bathroom adjoining my bedroom and took it off.

I gingerly wiggled my wrist then flexed my hand. My arm had obviously never been broken, probably just sprained. It felt whole, stronger than ever. I peeled off the finger splints to find they were better than fine, too. There was a faint smudge of red and black on my forearm, like a smear of ink. While I rinsed it off, I turned my face from side to side in the mirror, wishing my bruises would heal as quickly. I'd spent most of my life as an attractive blonde. Now, a badly battered girl with short black hair stared back at me.

I turned away.

While I'd convalesced, Barrons had gotten me one of those little refrigerators college kids use in dorms, and stocked me up on snacks. I popped open a soda and sprawled across the bed. I read and surfed the Net the rest of the day, trying to educate myself on all the paranormal stuff I'd spent the first twenty-two years of my life belittling and ignoring.

For a week now, I'd been waiting for the army from Hell to come. I wasn't stupid enough to believe this little lull was anything but the calm before the storm.

Was Mallucé really dead? Though I'd stabbed the citron-eyed vampire during my aborted showdown with the Lord Master, and the last thing I'd seen before losing consciousness from the injuries he'd dished out in retaliation was Barrons slamming him into a wall, I wasn't convinced of his demise and wouldn't be, until I heard something from the empty-eyed worshippers that stuffed the vamp's Goth mansion to overflowing on the south side of Dublin. In the Lord Master's employ—while two-timing and withholding powerful relics from the Unseelie leader—Mallucé had tried to kill me in order to silence me before I could betray his dirty secret. If he was still alive, I had no doubt he'd be coming after me again, sooner rather than later.

Mallucé wasn't the only worry on my mind. Was the Lord Master really unable to get past the ancient wards laid in blood and stone around the bookstore, as Barrons assured me? Who'd been driving the car transporting the mind-bending evil of the
Sinsar Dubh
past the bookstore last week? Where had it been taken? Why? What were all the Unseelie recently freed by the Lord Master doing right now? And just how responsible was I for them? Does being one of the few people who can do something about a problem make you responsible for fixing it?

It was midnight before I slept, bedroom door locked, windows buttoned up tight, lights ablaze.

The instant I opened my eyes, I knew something was wrong.

TWO

I
t wasn't just my
sidhe
-seer senses that tipped me off, screaming something Fae was very near.

My bedroom has hardwood floors and there's no threshold strip beneath the door. I usually wedge a towel into the gap—okay, several—packed in by books, fortified with a chair, topped by a lamp so if some bizarre new monster slithers in through the crack, the lamp breaking will startle me awake, and buy me just enough time to be almost conscious when it kills me.

Last night I forgot.

As soon as I roll over in the morning, I glance at the haphazard stack. It's my way of reassuring myself that nothing found me during the night and I live to see another day in Dublin, for whatever that's worth. This morning my observation that I'd forgotten to stuff the crack was accompanied by another that made my heart freeze: The gap beneath the door was dark.

Black. As in pitch.

I leave all the lights on at night, not just inside my bedroom but inside the entire bookstore, and outside the building, too. The exterior of Barrons Books and Baubles is flanked front, sides, and back by brilliant floodlights, to keep the Shades in the adjacent Dark Zone at bay. The one time Barrons turned off those lights after dark, sixteen men were killed right outside the back door.

The interior is also meticulously lit, with recessed spotlights on the ceilings and dozens of table and floor lamps illuminating every nook and cranny. Since my run-in with the Lord Master, I've been leaving all of them on, twenty-four/seven. So far Barrons hasn't said a word to me about the pending astronomical utility bill and if he does I'm going to tell him to take it out of my account—the one he
should
be setting up for me for being his own personal OOP detector. Using my
sidhe
-seer talents to locate ancient Fae relics—Objects of Power, or OOPs for short—is hardly my idea of a dream job. The dress code leans toward black with stiletto heels, a style I've never gotten into; I prefer pastels and pearls. And the hours are lousy; I'm usually up all night, playing psychic lint brush in dark and scary places, stealing things from scary people. He can take my food and phone bills out of that account, and I could use a clothing allowance, too, for the things of my own that keep getting ruined. Blood and green goo are no friends of detergent.

I craned my neck to see out the window. It was still raining heavily; the glass panes were dark, and as far as I could tell from the warm cocoon of my bed the exterior floodlights weren't on, which hit me about as hard as getting dropped, bleeding, into a tank of hungry sharks.

I
hate
the dark.

I shot from bed like a rock from a slingshot—one moment lying there, next crouched battle-ready in the middle of the room, a flashlight in each hand.

Dark outside the store, dark inside, beyond my bedroom door: “What the fr—fuck?” I exclaimed, then muttered, “Sorry, Mom.” Raised in the Bible Belt by a mother who'd firmly advocated the pervasive southern adage that “pretty girls don't have ugly mouths,” Alina and I had created our own language for expletives at a young age. Ass was “petunia,” crap was “fudge-buckets,” the f-word was “frog.” Unfortunately, when you grow up saying those words instead of the actual cusswords, they prove every bit as hard a habit to break as cussing and tend to come out at inopportune moments, undermining your credibility in a big way. “Frog off, or I'll kick your petunia” just doesn't carry a lot of weight with the kind of people I've been encountering lately, nor have my genteel southern manners impressed anyone but me. I've been retraining myself, but it's slow going.

Had one of my deepest fears manifested while I'd slept, and the power had gone out? As soon as I had that thought, I realized that not only was the clock still blinking the time, 4:01
A.M.
, cheery and orange as ever, but, duh, my overhead was on, same as it was every night when I went to sleep.

Juggling two flashlights into one hand, I fumbled the phone from the receiver. I tried to think of someone to call but drew a complete blank. I didn't have any friends in Dublin, and although Barrons seems to keep a residence in the store, he's rarely around and I have no idea how to reach him. There was no way I was calling the police.

I was on my own. I replaced the receiver and listened hard. The silence in the store was deafening, fraught with terrible possibilities—monsters lurking with homicidal glee, right outside my bedroom door.

I wriggled into my jeans, swapped a flashlight for my spear, stuffed three more flashlights in the back of my waistband, and crept to the door.

I could feel that there was something Fae beyond it, but that was all I knew. Not what, how many, or even how close, just a deep malaise in my stomach accompanied by a foul itchiness in my brain that made me feel like a cat with its back up, claws out, fur spiked. Barrons assures me
sidhe
-seer senses improve with experience. Mine had better start improving fast or I won't live to see next week. I stared at the door. I must have stood there for five minutes trying to talk myself into opening it. The unknown is a vast paralyzing limbo. I'd like to tell you that the monster under the bed is rarely as bad as your fear of it, but in my experience it's almost always worse.

I slid the dead bolt, parted door from jamb in the narrowest of slivers, and knifed the sharp white beam of my flashlight through it.

A dozen Shades shrank back, retreating with oily swiftness to the edge of the light and not one inch further. Adrenaline kicked me in the teeth. I slammed the door shut and drove the dead bolt home.

There were Shades inside Barrons Books and Baubles!

How in the world had
that
happened? I'd checked the lights before I'd gone to bed—they'd all been on!

I pressed myself against the door, shaking, wondering if I'd really woken up or if I was still dreaming. I've had some bad dreams lately and this was certainly the stuff of nightmares. I might be a
sidhe
-seer and a mythic Null, I might have one of the Fae's deadliest weapons in my possession, but even I'm defenseless against the lowest caste of Unseelie. Ironic, I know.

“Barrons!” I shouted. For reasons my taciturn host refuses to divulge, the Shades leave him alone. That the deadly bottom-feeders of the dark Fae give Jericho Barrons a wide berth perturbs me immensely but I'd promise to never ask him another question about it again, if only he'd cut a swath through them right now and save me.

I shouted his name until my throat hurt, but no knight-errant rushed to my rescue.

Under normal circumstances, if the Shades had been outside the store in the streets, dawn would have driven the amorphous vampires back to wherever it is they hide during the day, but it was so stormy I doubted enough light could filter through the bookstore's alcoved windows to affect them in here. Even if the dense cloud cover passed and the sun came out, strong sunlight wouldn't enter the main floor of the bookstore before early afternoon.

I groaned. But Fiona would, long before that. This past week she'd begun working extended hours at the bookstore. Increased customer demand, she'd said. Lots of early morning clients. She'd been arriving at the shop at precisely eight-forty-five
A.M.
to open the bookstore at nine o'clock sharp.

I had to warn her off, before she walked into a waiting Shade ambush!

And now that I thought about it, I was pretty sure she knew how to reach Barrons, too. I snatched up the phone and rang the operator.

“County?” he inquired.

“All of Dublin,” I said briskly. Surely Fiona lived nearby. If not, I'd try the outlying counties.

“Name?”

“Fiona … uh … Fiona …” With a sound of disgust, I dropped the phone back in the cradle. I was so panicked I hadn't realized I didn't know Fiona's last name until I'd needed it.

Back to square one.

I had two choices: I could stay up here, safe with my flashlights while, in a few hours, the Shades devoured Fiona and any number of innocent, hapless patrons who might subsequently stroll through the door she unlocked, or get my panicked act together and stop that from happening.

But how?

Light was my only weapon against the Shades. Though I suspected Barrons might get positively hostile if I set his store on fire, I had matches, and it would certainly drive them out. However, I didn't want to be inside the building when it went up in flames, and since I could hardly jump from the fourth floor, and there was no fire escape or convenient stash of bed linens to knot into a rope, I filed that option away in the category “Last Resort.” Unfortunately I could see only one other resort, and it wasn't a sunny spot in the Bahamas. I stared dismally at the door.

I was going to have to run the gauntlet.

How had the Shades gotten inside to begin with? Was the power out in part of the store and they'd slithered in through a crack? Could they do that? Or had the lights somehow gotten turned off? If so, I could creep from switch to switch, armed with flashlights, and turn them back on.

I don't know if you're familiar with the child's game Don't Touch the Alligator, but Alina and I used to play it when Mom was too busy with something else to notice that we were hopping from the Sunday parlor sofa, to her favorite lace-covered pillows, to that awful chair Gram brocaded to match the curtains, and so on. The idea is that the floor is full of alligators and if you step on one of them, you're dead. You have to get from one room to the next, without ever touching the floor.

I needed to get from the top floor of the bookstore to the bottom without ever touching the dark, and I wasn't sure how completely I couldn't touch it. Barrons says they can only get you in full darkness, but did that mean a Shade could eat me, or part of me, if for one second, a single foot, or something so small as a toe protruded into shadow? The stakes in this game were significantly higher than a carpet-burned knee, or a scolding from Mom if I slipped up. I'd seen the piles of clothing and human rinds the Shades left behind after a meal.

Shivering, I pulled on my boots, zipped a jacket over my pajama top, and tucked two of my six flashlights into the waistband of my jeans, front and back, pointed up. I tucked two more into the snug elastic waistband of my jacket, pointed down to shine on my vulnerable toes. Those were iffy. If I moved too quickly they'd fall out, but I only had so many hands. I carried the other two. I slipped a pack of matches into my pocket and tucked the spear into my boot. I'd have no use for it against this particular enemy, but there might be others. It was possible the Shades were merely the vanguard, and there was worse to come.

I took a deep breath, squared my shoulders, and opened the door. When the overhead light arced into the hallway, the Shades repeated their oily retreat.

Shades come in all different shapes and sizes. Some are small and thin, others tall and wide. They have no real substance. They're hard to pick out from the darkness, but once you know what to look for you can spot them, if you're a
sidhe
-seer. They're areas that are darker and denser, and ooze malevolence. They move around a lot, as if they're hungry and restless. They make no noise. Barrons says they're barely sentient, but once I shook my fist at one of them and it bristled back at me. That's sentient enough to worry me. They eat anything that lives: people, animals, birds, right down to the worms in the soil. When they take over a neighborhood, they turn it into a wasteland. I'd christened those barren landscapes Dark Zones.

“I can do this. Piece of cake.” Embracing the lie, I aimed my flashlights and stepped into the hall.

 

It
was
a piece of cake. Turned out the power wasn't off; the switches had been thrown. Initially, I worked my way cautiously from wall switch to lamp, but when I realized the Shades were consistently staying beyond the reach of direct light, I gained confidence. Even in a windowless hallway of utter blackness, the flashlights bathed my body in white radiance that protected me. With each switch I threw, more Shades bunched up, until I had fifty or more of them crammed into the darkness I was forcing to retreat, light by light.

By the time I reached the landing of the first-floor stairwell, I was feeling downright cocky about my ability to clear the store of the Unseelie infestation.

I stepped briskly into the back parlor, heading for the light switch on the opposite wall. Three steps into the room, a damp breeze ruffled my hair. I swung my flashlight in that direction. A window was open onto the alley behind Barrons Books and Baubles! The truth was inescapable—interior and exterior lights off, a window propped open? Someone was trying to kill me!

I stomped toward the window and sprawled headlong over an ottoman that shouldn't have been there. My flashlights went flying in all directions, casting a dizzying strobe light effect as they spun out of control across the floor. Shades erupted like panicked pigeons, flocking through the open window to the sanctuary of night.